Suicide missions are hardly unknown happenings, so presumably it wouldn’t be too hard to find a volunteer to take a long walk off a short pier and dive into the heart of a Black Hole. Well, let’s trade in the walk and the pier for a spaceship, with our suicidal pilot crewmember willing to boldly go. What might she expect? For that matter what might a chickenhearted outside observer expect to see?
Space isn’t really the final frontier; rather the inside of a Black Hole that’s inside of space really is the final frontier. Only the insanely suicidal need boldly go and explore, as it’s unlikely that the innards of a Black Hole will become a popular tourist attraction for many a millennia to come – if ever.
Okay, we have a depressed, suicidal, boldly going spaceship pilot, and she’s determined to go out in a blaze of glory and make her mark in the history books. No ordinary suicide for this woman! It’s across the event horizon threshold and down the hatch of a Black Hole. I need point out here and explain that technical term ‘event horizon’ – it’s just that location that divides the ability to return home safely from the point of no return, ever.
Countdown: Five, four, three, two, one – we have lift-off on the maiden voyage to boldly go and see what’s to be seen from the inside of a Black Hole.
As far as our suicidal pilot is concerned, everything from launch to crossing the event horizon is as normal as taking the cross-town bus to work. Time will tick by at one second per second; her mass will register normal; length ditto. However, due to Einstein’s concepts in all things being relative, an external observer will see our boldly going pilot’s reality slightly differently.
An external observer, say relaxing back on Earth with a super powerful telescope, follows ionization trail of the boldly going voyager’s spaceship to the nearest Black Hole. Basically, what this person sees is that as the suicidal voyager blasts off from Earth, picks up speed, her ship and contents (including herself) start to shrink in length, increase in mass, and her rate-of-change (time) ticks by more slowly compared to Mr. Stay-At-Home’s own. Okay, that’s in keeping with Einstein’s relativity proclamations.
But for some inexplicable reason, I’ve read several times some scientific author suggest that to an external observer, the suicidal pilot will not only be travelling slower and slower by the external observer’s clock as she approaches the event horizon, but in fact at contact with the event horizon her time, again as recorded by the external observer, will have stopped. In other words, the external observer will never witness the pilot’s crossover from outside the Black Hole’s event horizon to inside the Black Hole’s event horizon. The pilot will appear to be frozen in time at the event horizon, yet as far as the pilot is concerned, everything is normal in terms of time flowing at one second per second.
Now that’s a major paradox. The pilot can’t be crossing the event horizon at one second per second, while at the same time being frozen in time at the time of crossing, according to our stay-at-home observer. Of course the paradox is bullshit. To an external observer, time only comes to a screeching halt for someone external to them if they witness that someone travelling at the speed of light. Firstly, that’s a physical impossibility. There’s no reason to believe that our suicidal pilot is crossing the event horizon at light speed. There’s no absolute requirement that our suicidal pilot is crossing the event horizon at the speed of light. She in fact might have fired her retro-rockets to slow down just prior to crossing the event horizon in order to better savour the moment! So, in actual reality, our observer will see the pilot cross the event horizon, albeit at a way slower rate than the pilot herself because the pilot is travelling, hence doing the event horizon cross-over at less than the speed of light. IMHO, some ‘experts’ need to go back and redo Physics 101.
In any event, once the external observer observes our boldly going suicidal voyager cross the event horizon, the show is over for him. Nothing that’s part and parcel of the voyager, not her ship’s reflected or emitted light, not her radio signals nor information signalling of any kind, will recross the event horizon in the outward bound direction and heading back to Earth. Our external observer can pack away his telescope and get back to more interesting pursuits, like watching daytime television. But that’s not quite the end of the story.
And so it’s now over to the (never-to-be-revealed) recorded flight log of the voyager on her one-way trip to the Black Hole’s never-never land. Up to and including the crossover from the safe side of the event horizon to the ‘abandon hope all who enter here’ side of the event horizon, all is logged as 100% normalcy. Nothing shrinks, nothing grows in weight (increases in mass), and time does its one second per second thing as it always has done. It’s as easy as a trip from your home driveway to the supermarket parking lot, only once in the grip of the supermarket parking lot, forever in the grip of the supermarket parking lot. It’s a one-way ‘enter’ gate without a corresponding ‘exit’ sign.
Since we have no idea what the inside of a Black Hole actually is, since theoretical physics, quantum and relativity physics, break down into a mathematical mess, what our intrepid voyager will actually observe or experience is anybody’s guesstimate. There does appear to be one consensus however. Gravity rules, OK? Almost by definition there’s a hell of a lot of gravity to contend with once inside the supermarket parking lot – oops, sorry, inside the event horizon.
Now here on Earth, when standing up, gravity is pulling at your feet ever so slightly greater than it is tugging at your head – because your feet are slightly closer to Earth’s centre of mass. Earth’s gravity however is so weak that you don’t know or can’t feel the difference, but tests or experiments with extremely accurate atomic clocks show that this is true. Rate of change – time – is affected by gravity, so a clock atop a tall building runs slightly faster than an identical clock in the building’s basement. Now the gravity of a Black Hole is many, many, many orders of magnitude stronger than it is here on Terra Firma. So, it is speculated that if you are inside a Black Hole, say in free-fall, and say in a vertical position, then the gravity pulling on your feet will be not only vastly greater than if you were on Earth, but also the differential between feet and head will be orders of magnitude greater. Translated, gravity inside a Black Hole is going to stretch you out like a piece of taffy. Like in one of those fun house mirrors, you will be very, very, very tall and very, very, very thin. Ultimately you will be akin to a piece of string or spaghetti, but by that time you’ll be very, very, very dead as the human body wasn’t designed to be viable under such a state of affairs. Okay, that’s the consensus.
To be continued…
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